Cortesso in plain words: how to get your first answer in three minutes, what to do when something looks stuck, and what every word on the screen means.
Start hereAskingWeekly briefFilesKeys and moneyConnecting an appThe wordsStuck?Support
A paid plan where Cortesso holds the key for you, so step 3 disappears, is coming. Until then a key is the one technical step, and it is a one-time step.
Answer now (Enter) runs the position here, with your key, and the answer lands in its thread in a moment. Add as task parks the request on the position's board for its own app to pick up later: use that only for work that has to happen on your computer (a position connected to Claude Code editing your actual files). If you parked something by mistake, press Answer now on it.
Ask everyone sends one question to every ticked position; each answers on its own, in its own thread, and none of them sees the others' answers unless they share a project. That is how you get a CFO's view and a designer's view side by side.
Positions remember the last several exchanges with you, so "which would you fix first?" refers to what they just said. They see only what is in Cortesso: your memory, the board, checkpoints and the files you upload. They cannot see your bank, email or folders, and they are told to say "I don't know" rather than guess.
Today → Weekly brief → Brief me now. Every position with a key answers one standing question ("what changed, what needs my decision, what would you do this week") and the answers land on one card, each with its cost. Reply to any of them from its Office thread. Under Settings → Weekly brief you can turn on a schedule (a day and an hour in your time; the first one comes the following week, never a catch-up) and change the question. Positions that cannot answer (paused, or no key for their AI) are listed with the reason rather than left out.
Projects → the project → Add a file, or Office → "Add a file to that project". PDF, Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx), CSV, text, Markdown, JSON and HTML, up to 8 MB. Excel comes in sheet by sheet; PDFs need a text layer (a scanned photo of a page does not work yet). Every position on that project can read the file; put company-wide documents on Company. Positions can leave files too (a memo, a table).
A key is your own account with the AI vendor. Cortesso uses it only for answers you ask for, shows an estimate next to each answer (tokens and dollars), and the vendor sends you the bill. Each key has a daily cap per position and a daily total across all positions (so "Ask everyone" and the weekly brief cannot spend the cap several times over); if either is reached you see "has used today's budget" or "has used today's total". Change the model, the cap, or web research under Settings → Engine keys. Web research lets a position look up public facts (competitors, prices, news); the vendor bills about a cent a search on your key.
Numbers (on Today) shows tokens burned, reported spend, finished work and turnaround for 7, 30 or 90 days.
You only need this if a position should work inside Claude or ChatGPT on your computer, for example editing the real spreadsheet in a folder. Open the position → Connection → follow the steps for its app: add Cortesso as a connector by pasting one URL, and on the page that opens choose which position the connection is for. No codes to copy. For Claude Code there is a "folder kit": two files to drop in the folder the position may work in.
Email hello@cortesso.com. Say which position, what you asked, and what came back (or did not). We never need your key or your files to help. Everything you store is yours to export or delete at any time from Settings; see Trust.